Moneysupermarket causing glitch in Google results?

So it was brought to my attention that price comparison site Moneysupermarket.com was showing up in some rather odd search results in Google. If you search in Google UK for compare credit cards, you will notice that besides ranking number 1 (kudos) the site also ranks for 12 other positions in the top 30 – meaning they are 43% of the top 30 search results for this highly competitive term!

Just look at what Google returns in their top 30 results:

I’ve abbreviated the domain when in fact a number of landing pages show up, including quite a few irrelevant ones, see below:

Surely this must be an error in Google’s algorithm as there is nothing I can see on-site or at first glance off site to warrant this scale of coverage. Perhaps Matt Cutt’s would like to give us an explanation?

2 Comments

I’ve seen something similar with one of our clients, with their competitor and a Government site completely dominating the first 3 pages of Google

SEOmoz has also covered it, christening it The Bigfoot Update. As I mentioned in the comments, I’m hoping it’s just a bug. It’s got to be, surely. I also said:

“I’m doing a search for something at the moment and I dismissed a site the first time I saw it. I’m on page 2 now and I’ve seen it another 5 times. Seeing it again and again doesn’t persuade me to try it if I already know it’s not the right page for what I’m looking for. It doesn’t make for a good user experience at all.”

Yep, have seen this for a few terms in the health insurance sector too – though it appears to be comparethemarket.com that appear multiple times across the 2nd and 3rd page of results (example “compare health insurance”).

There are a few other articles which have noted similar issues with travel terms too since June.